Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season 3 Episode 8: Evil Plans

What is it ? : Amidala is having a state banquet and sends C-3PO and R2-D2 out to buy some fruit to top the cake which is the centrepiece of the banquet. Cad Bane spots them out in the streets, and wants to capture C-3PO so arranges for R2 to be distracted by the very affordable prices in some kind of Robo-Brothel, and captures C-3PO.
C-3PO is tortured by Bane and his collection of droids, but reveals he has no knowledge of the layout of the Senate, the information Bane is after, but reveals R2 does. So Bane sends his droids to capture R2.
R2 evades them, but after discovering that they are going to possibly destroy C-3PO, he allows himself to be captured.
Bane extracts the information from R2, mind wipes the 2 droids of what has happened and they return to Amidala with the fruit so her banquet is a success.
Bane takes the information back to Jabba the Hutt, and is then hired to jail break Ziro the Hutt from his prison, setting up the events we saw at the very beginning of last season.

High Points : Well I suppose this answers the question no-one had, "How did Cad Bane get hold of blueprints of a public building?", and I suppose it's a little more exciting than him going to the library and asking for the plans, or just bribing a senator for the information (I'm sure the Trade Federation Representative would trade the information). But apart from that, the episode is pure filler, nothing of importance happens, and it doesn't advance the overarching plot in the slightest.

Low Points : However, for all of its pointlessness, the episode isn't terrible, the dialogue is okay, and really I've only got a couple of niggles.

There doesn't seem to have been a lot of time and attention paid to this episode, and in one area it shows, the LEP droids, these bunny eared droids have turned up a couple of times, and are a nice addition to the universe (a supposedly child friendly droid design pressed into other work when it failed safety tests). However, there are dozens of them in this episode, the pass by in the streets in crowds, they're the serving droids at the banquet. And it looks to me as if when asked to populate scenes with droids, the artists already had the LEP droid asset loaded, so copied and pasted it all over the place.
Another glimpse at the lack of care and attention paid, is when R2 enters the Robo-Brothel, there's a Twilek female shopping at a kiosk outside. When he emerges some time later (an hour at least) she's standing in exactly the same spot, turns and leaves. Again, it seems to me as if the artists just used all the same assets in the scene as were there in the previous scene in that street, meaning that all the people in the street were exactly the same. I may be wrong, but it certainly looked that way to me.

Oh, and while I'm being nit-picking, RA series droids, there are a bunch of them in this episode as well. However if I remember my background on them right, they were build during the time of the Empire, and awarded to senior Imperial Officers, but had sub-programming so they would spy on those officers for the Empire. When some officers discovered this, they abandoned them after mind wipes, leaving them confused wandering the streets of Mos Eisley, and sitting in Jawa Sandcrawlers, etc. But showing them here, seems to contradict that, not sure if it counts as another continuity change though?

So what do you really think ? : I'm trying to avoid harping on about continuity, as I covered that yesterday, but it's still annoying.

Final Words : To grudgingly give this episode any respect, the next episode follows on from Ziro's jail break, so a bit of a refresher on what's happened may have been okay. However, we never saw them escape from Coruscant with Ziro while being pursued by the legal authorities of the Galaxy and the Jedi, so unless we see that, there was something far more interesting this episode could have been showing instead of 3PO's and R2's misadventures while shopping for fruit.

Also, Robo-Brothels, with sexy female droids giving tired out business droids massages and oil baths. Seriously? In a kids show?

Score : 7/10

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